How did you do it??

How we saved with a family of 5...

A lot of people have been asking me how did I afford or save for this trip, seems people like talking about money so I'm going to fill a few blanks in with the $$ and please let me know if I can help with anything.

For about 12 months Adam (my adorable husband) has been NAGGING me to commit to this trip! Think I'm joking... I'm not! So after month and months of small fights, I finally caved after he said: "If you don't want to go, ill go by myself!" Selfish hey...

Rewind... November 17 (OK OK ILL GO) Now to work out how we are going to afford this trip!

So we both have really good jobs but as a normal Australian family we have overheads right, and they won't be going anytime soon. We sit down every couple of months a talk about our finances. So we had a rough idea how much we could scrape by with and for how long to be about to save 

$10 000. Now, I don't know any normal working family that can save that about the amount of money and still live comfortably!

Airbnb - This was something that we did do about 5 times before we left which was a great little injection into the holiday fund. It's not for everyone. Unless you can detach from the connection of your personal space then I advise against it. But we pretty much went through each room and stripped it back to basics. The kids would get a tub that they could put the stuff they didn't want anyone else touching in it and then it goes to the shed, same with the bills tub, our personal stuff, all in the shed while we had people renting the house out. 

Online Business - This was massive for us. I started my own online business 12 months prior and this would become most of our savings. On average I would take home about $1500 per month (on top of my normal wage) this can vary depending on how much work I put in. But to be honest I don't think this trip would have happened without this cash going aside. I would love to share this with anyone that's interested in knowing more.

Savings out of our normal wages - This wasn't much, maybe $800 or $900 per month. But mostly it was the Airbnb and Online got us where we needed to be. As you all know you can save money but something always pops up that we need (new washing machine, big electricity bill, the list goes on)

In the end, we had $12 000 saved and knowing that the everyday living expenses would be sorted cause Adam would be getting paid while we are away. But my day job was time without pay, So my Online wage would still be coming in each month as we travel (which was a great feeling)

If anyone wants to know more I'm happy to chat offline, you can find me on FB or Instagram

Tabitha Blake 💋